As yet no serious attempt appears to have been made to estimate the value of Hindu Thought and its influence on the progress of civilization. It is generally assumed that outside the limits of India, Hindu Civilization has exercised little influence. Perhaps the assumption is, on the whole, correct. The intellectual relations of Greece and through it, of Europe, to India will perhaps never admit of being fully cleared up. But apart from the question of its influence on the world at large, the history of the Hindu Intellect has a value of its own which has been but imperfectly recognised. If Europe presents to the student the more perfect type of civilization, India offers to him the more instructive though less interesting study of arrested development and decay. The intellectual history of Europe bears to that of India the same relation as physiology does to pathology; while the one presents the richer field for the investigation of the laws of the healthy and vigorous growth of civilization, the other furnishes greater facilities of studying it under the conditions of disease and death.
The study of Sanskrit is making its way in Europe, and the history and the literature of India occupy, it is satisfactory to know, a considerable share of the attention of her scholars at the present day. But it is to be regretted that the literature of Indian mythology and ritual should engross the attention of the learned, to the exclusion of the higher forms of intellectual activity which were developed at a later period of Hindu history. It must, of course, be admitted, that Hindu mythology is a subject of universal interest on account of its real or supposed affinity to the primitive beliefs of all the Aryan races, while Hindu Philosophy has no higher claim than that which arises from its being exclusively Indian. To us, indeed, who are the children of the soil, Hindu Philosophy is a far more important study than Hindu mythology. To us the nearer and more local is of greater interest than that which is the common property of all nations, and the real significance of which is lost in the dim shades of remote antiquity.
We have not, however, by any means shown any readiness to recognise Hindu Philosophy as an important branch of study. It is, indeed, still taught with reverence, and learnt with awe, in the secluded tols of Nadiya and other seats of ancient learning, but the philosophy of the tols is the most barren and unprofitable study in which the human intellect can engage itself. Philosophy as taught by the pandits, is simply a storehouse of verbal quibbles, and high proficiency in it is considered synonymous with high proficiency in the art of profitless wrangling. Why Jagadisa should have used nine letters where he might have used five, or of how many significations an ambiguous word in Gadadhara's Commentary can admit, are regarded as the highest problems of which it is allowed to the human intellect to attempt the solution. The sum of useful human knowledge would in no way be diminished, if by some fortunate accident, the philosophy of the tols disappeared from the face of the earth.
There are two aspects in which the natives of India can regard the study of Hindu Philosophy. We can study it for its own sake—for the philosophical knowledge which it will yield. We can also study it for the sake of the light it can throw on the past history of India,—on the great social changes of which it has often been the cause and often the consequence. It will be generally admitted that at the present day, in the full blaze of the light which the science and the philosophy of Europe pours upon us, the value of Hindu Philosophy, for the sake of the knowledge of Nature which it can impart, is insignificant.